For ages I couldn’t figure it out.
“Why do people go to school and study English for years, but can’t have a conversation in English outside of school?”
The question perplexed me for years.
I couldn’t understand how people studied English in school for 10+ years, but struggled to answer questions like:
“What’s your name?”
That was until I taught English at a high school in Asia and saw first-hand the reality of learning English at school.
Before we get into that, though, I just want to introduce myself.
I’m Sam Pealing. I’m an English language teacher, lecturer and speaking coach. I’ve been teaching for over 10 years – with four years of teaching academic English in a university in the UK. I have a MA in English Language Teaching, a CELTA, and I’m currently doing a PhD in Education at the University of York.
One thing that many of my students want to do is speak English confidently and fluently. They want that high-class English where you can automatically respond to questions using a variety of sentence structures and without using the same words again and again.
What’s more, all of my students are busy people… Usually they’re adults with full time jobs and families. Sometimes they’re students who are trying to balance their university studies, a part time job and their English language studies.
It’s not easy being an English learner, so that’s why I focus on getting my students fast results with simple yet extremely effective language learning strategies. This is something that I’ve been working on for the past 6 or 7 years, and I finally have a system that works every time.
I’ll put a link at the end of this story to my Fast English Formula where you can learn the exact strategies that I teach to my students to help them to speak English fluently fast.
As I was saying…
When I taught English at a high school in Asia, I saw first-hand the reality of learning English at school.
Students weren’t learning English to be able to speak it. They were learning complex grammar and weird vocabulary to be able to pass language tests and get good scores to apply for university.
Some students could speak well, but they were few and far between.
Most students were in the middle. They wanted to speak English, but had been so beaten down with exams and grammar that they just gave up trying to speak and focused on practicing for tests.
It’s a shame… but the school system isn’t really set up to help you to speak English well. It’s more focused on getting you to pass tests.
That’s not the case everywhere, though. Some schools in some countries help their students to improve their speaking.
But in most cases, it’s all about exams, tests and assessments.
We can’t blame the teachers though. Classroom teachers try hard, and they want you to improve.
But they are also faced with tests and exams, and they need to prepare you to do well.
Because if you don’t do well… The teachers get the blame.
That’s why, I make it my mission to help as many eager students who are trying their best to speak English as I can.
Learning to speak confident and fluent English isn’t difficult.
In fact, it’s very easy.
It just takes time and effort.
And with the simple, step-by-step system that I use with all of my students, both time and effort are cut down.
This brings us full circle to what I was talking about before: my Fast English Formula. It’s been developed over 6/7 years (but really, I started using it myself over 11 years ago!), and it’s helped hundreds of my own students to speak and use English with confidence.
The idea behind the Fast English Formula is simple: use learning strategies that work really effectively, and do them every day.
In total, I usually use between 3 and 6 different strategies with my students, and it’s their responsibility to practice these strategies outside of class.
The results are often very good and even people who have been learning English for over 10 years -OR- people who have been stuck with their English for ages suddenly find that by using my strategy-based system, they can start improving quickly.
You can check out the Fast English Formula here: